Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [69]
An advantage of multiple viewpoint lies in the fact that the author is not stuck with a single character for the duration of the book. When a scene winds to a close, and when there’s nothing further to be said about the viewpoint character for the time being, you simply skip two spaces and pick up one of the other principals.
In any novel of this sort, it makes good sense to keep your number of principal characters down to a manageable figure. When you pass the half dozen mark, it becomes a little more difficult for the reader to remember what’s going on and who’s doing what and why. You can, however, have any number of additional minor viewpoint characters, from whose vantage point an occasional scene or two is portrayed. This can add a sense of richness to a novel without diluting the reader’s attention to the main characters.
More important than learning a multitude of rules on the subject of viewpoint is that you be aware of the question of the point of view in your own reading. Your perceptions of the way other writers handle viewpoint changes, your sense of what works and what doesn’t, will teach you more about the subject than you can learn by reading about it.
I doubt that many readers are aware of point of view. They’re interested in characters and story. It’s possible, too, that I tend to pay more attention to consistency in this area than I need to.
Some years ago, for example, I wrote The Triumph of Evil under the pen name of Paul Kavanagh. The entire novel, written in the third person, was told from the point of view of Miles Dorn, assassin and agent provocateur. The entire novel, that is, with the exception of a single chapter which dealt with an assassination at which Dorn was not physically present. He was over a thousand miles away at the time, and it seemed essential to me that the scene be viewed from close up.
After considerable soul-searching, I shrugged heroically and wrote the scene from the point of view of the young man used as a pawn by Dorn. I felt this was a jarring inconsistency but couldn’t think of a better way to deal with it.
As far as I know, no one was ever bothered by this inconsistency, or even aware of it. No editor or writer who read the book mentioned it. Rereading the section preparatory to writing this chapter, it seemed to me unlikely that I would have noticed it myself—had I not been the book’s author. We who write these books are inevitably more aware of their essential structure than are the people who read them.
Don Westlake employs an interesting original framework for his Richard Stark novels about Parker, and I wonder if many of his faithful readers are aware of it. In almost every Parker novel, the first two quarters of the book are told exclusively from Parker’s point of view. The third quarter is told from the individual points of view of all of the other principal characters. Then, in the fourth section, once again Parker is the viewpoint character throughout.
I think this serves Westlake superbly. But I doubt that very many Parker fans pay much mind to the almost symphonic structure of these books. I suspect they’re interested in the plot and the characters, and they want to find out how the heist turns out and who winds up alive and dead when it’s over. I don’t think they care how the author does it.
It’s useful for us as writers to care, and to pay attention. But an excessive preoccupation may be more liability than asset. The main thing is always the story.
Transitions
When I first started writing, I had a certain amount of difficulty getting from